Over the past month the release cadence of Kova has settled, bi-weekly releases at the moment is working well now that bugs are minor and most expected features have been implemented. It allows allows me breathing room around my own research and teaching. Some road-mapped features have been achieved, and new ideas have starting coming to the project which has been really positive.

This has now been achieved and version 0.0.1 is available on the VS Code extension marketplace. The extension brings Kova-specific syntax highlighting to Markdown files, and adds a shortcut to launch the file using Kova's presentation engine. Presenting depends on Kova being installed on the host system. 

As a long-term Linux user, the hardest part was getting my head around the submission process and Azure platform! 

As of version 0.8.1 - code signing on Windows is now fixed and working. All Windows executables going forward will bare this signing. Shout out to Philip at Signpath for support in getting signing working correct. 

This is something that wasn't on the previous development updates as, quite simply, it did not exist.

Pele is an alternate renderer for mermaid diagrams. It is significantly smaller and faster than traditional rendering using mermaid.js. According to the official website, pele.run, 6x smaller and up to 500x faster. 

I chose to implement this as soon as I found out about it as I had recently encountered an issue with a diagram-heavy 54 set of slides with a large amount of diagrams. On Linux where Kova uses webkit to render, it chugged. I mean near app lock-up chugged. As of 0.8.2, Pele can be chosen as the renderer for diagrams but it is not set by default. I am monitoring the development of Pele with intention for it to become the default renderer with Mermaid.js still being bundled as fallback until Pele matures further. 

Work has yet to commence here, more from a time perspective. Personally, Obsidian has been a very influential software and I think that Steph Ango's approach to community interaction is exactly what we should expect of more software teams. 

On paper, implementing this should be straightforward. Submitting to Obsidian community plugins does have an approval process which shouldn't be too much trouble. 

Next Steps

My focus over the next few weeks is to start tackling the Obsidian plugin, and something that I do not anticipate to be too much of a challenge after dealing with the VS Code plugin submission process. 

Minor improvements and fixes will continue to be implemented on the core Kova application alongside this, I welcome users opening issues when they do encounter issues and suggestions are always welcome. 

For platform releases, I am currently working on an ebuild file for Gentoo Linux, I intend to have this hosted on a dedicated overlay initially before submitting it for review to be added to the main GURU repository.

As always, as cliché as it may sound, thank you all for your continued use of Kova. Even though the stats for downloads are limited to direct downloads from Github only (no VPS stats for Linux) I estimate that we are at least at around 200 installations, however I believe the actual number to be higher. That is amazing to me.

Keep submitting issues or feature requests to tracker found here - if you want to submit an issue or suggestion but do not have or want a Github account, you can email directly to [email protected].